Sony Cyber-shot DSC-M2

Performance
Closing in on your photographic subject on the M2's 3x optical zoom lens can be a bit slow so you'll have to either settle for wide-angle pictures or risk losing that spontaneous shot while you slowly tiptoe towards maximum telephoto range. Users who are faithful to the half-press shutter release technique may need some adjusting as it was difficult to determine whether the half-press feature had been activated with its shallow button.

Be prepared to fork out more money for a high-capacity Memory Stick Duo card if you intend to shoot lots of video.

The M2 didn't disappoint us with its impressive startup--from sliding open the camera to turning the LCD to face us and finally snapping that first shot--of less than 2 seconds (time taken can be significantly reduced if you repeat the above action sequence continuously). Shutting down the camera was almost instantaneous using the side power button.

In its burst mode, the Cyber-shot allowed us to capture four 5-megapixel frames at JPEG Fine quality setting. Shot-to-shot timings came in at a lethargic 3.5 seconds with flash enabled and 3.2 seconds without flash. After we disabled the image review option, the M2's speed came in slightly better at 3.2 seconds with flash and 1.6 seconds without.

In our tests, shutter lag was barely noticeable under brightly lit environments. The flash range was limited to around 2.5m at wide-angle and 2m at full telephoto setting. The Sony's InfoLithium battery offered average battery life performance, clocking approximately 180 images (and videos), alternating between the wide-angle and telephoto lengths, photos with flash and without, slideshow review and card formatting. As a general rule of thumb, battery life will drain faster if you shoot more videos than pictures.

On a separate test, we discovered that our fully-charged battery was left with about 20 minutes of juice left when we expended our 1GB Memory Stick Duo Pro on a 46-minute video recording. So be prepared to carry an extra high-capacity Memory Stick Duo card around if you intend to shoot a lot of movies because chances are you will run out of space faster than your battery.

Image Quality
The M2 produced pleasing images with hardly any significant flaws like its predecessor. Noise was not much of an issue at low ISO levels but becomes expectedly more visible above ISO 200.

At ISO 100.

Noise is visible at higher ISO levels. This was taken at ISO 400.

We noticed chromatic aberration in the form of white lining along the edges of high contrast objects only upon magnification of the image. Otherwise, it was barely visible.

The original photo.

Under high magnification, chromatic aberration is clearly visible.

Similar to the M1, the M2 doesn't come with manual white balance which may annoy some photographers. Our macro shots turned out well with the subject in clear focus and the background appropriately blurred.

Though the stereo microphones gave us above average sound quality, we noted intermittent lapses and dropped frames during video playback. Also, we were unable to view the captured MPEG-4 videos on Windows Media Player 10 but didn't encounter any problems using Quicktime Player.

Overall, while we did not notice any noteworthy improvements on the image and video quality, the Cyber-shot DSC-M2 still presents itself as a good cross between a digicam and a camcorder.

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